Google eliminated Chimera Painter, a web-based tool that allows anyone to generate terrifying cryptozoological entities in an interface resembling MS Paint via Diablo. Because, you ask? Well, isn't it obvious? No ... no, I guess it isn't.
Surely the strangest thing that has been hitting Google's AI blog for at least a month, the Chimera Painter actually has something of a reason to exist. The team was looking for ways to accelerate the creation of game art, which is often fantastic and creative. An AI assistant that could produce a reasonable image of, say, an owl bear on the hunt, could be useful for an artist looking for inspiration. In 2019 Nvidia released a similar tool for generating photorealistic landscape images.
To pursue this somewhat esoteric goal, the team naturally decided to build an entire fantasy digital card game in which players combine animals and make them fight. So far, I think you'll agree that this is pretty standard stuff.
The idea was that if there are one hundred animals in the game, and each one can be combined with each other, you quickly get a lot more combinations than you would expect from any artist. But machine learning systems never complain or bill you.
To create an AI agent capable of creating arbitrary creatures, the team first trained it on existing animals and their many parts by fueling the system with thousands of images of CG creatures and corresponding images labeling their parts: claws, part. front of leg, eyes, etc.
Soon the agent was able to generate plausible-looking animals from user-generated assemblies of parts, painting on fur, leather, and other features based on how he learned the "real" creatures looked. It is a generative network of antagonism or GAN, which means that two work together: one generates an image, the other criticizes it, then the first takes the feedback and generates it again, and so on.
Basically, the system doesn't blink (or should I say, dino-bat-hybrid an eye) when the assembly of labeled parts doesn't look anything like a real animal. As far as the chimera generator knows, there are dogs with chameleon heads, long noses and tiny, useless wings. Why not?
And now, I have to undo my recent claim that Google lacks generosity, because they made the Chimera Painter available for everyone to play with. I have to warn you, however, that it barely worked for me, allowing only the larger brushes and apparently choosing from a selection of charcuterie for its different textures.
Not that it was an obstacle to the execution of my vision:
Gorgeous!
In conclusion, he asks Google: "What can be created using machine learning like a brush?". In fact, there seems to be no limit whatsoever. But maybe there should be.